tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post2023391964498409511..comments2024-03-18T16:55:31.971+00:00Comments on This Space: Smothered Words by Sarah KofmanStephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-87896256407216473522023-08-07T16:11:24.570+01:002023-08-07T16:11:24.570+01:00Thanks Gary. Apologies for the delay in posting yo...Thanks Gary. Apologies for the delay in posting your comment. I didn't get the moderating email. I'll see if I can find Griselda Pollock's essay. SteveAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-41096596198068430162023-08-01T15:46:23.183+01:002023-08-01T15:46:23.183+01:00Stephen, thanks for the post which I have found ve...Stephen, thanks for the post which I have found very helpful in my further understanding of Kofman. I too have come to Smothered Words late, in my case through Griselda Pollock and her essay in the Palgrave Macmillan text Representing Auschwitz: 'Art as a Transport Station of Trauma' which I recommend. Whilst the former reply is interesting I can appreciate how it would read a tad heavy handed. Thats academics for you!Garyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01700073847745334166noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-88226604037692997422018-01-29T22:35:53.406+00:002018-01-29T22:35:53.406+00:00Thanks for the comment, only I didn't expect t...Thanks for the comment, only I didn't expect the Spanish Inquistion. <br /><br />Although I didn't mention it, I haven't read anything else of Kofman's apart from the Smothered Words and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, and I have not read any blog posts on her – indeed, I haven't seen anything on her work; anecdotes new or rehashed, hushed or unhushed – which is in part why I wanted to write this. I haven't read more because I have no access to a library that holds her earlier or later work and can't afford to buy any (I found RORL in the backroom of a remainderd bookshop for £1). <br /><br />I came to Smothered Word years ago because of my interest in Blanchot and his writing on Antelme, and I wanted to write about it despite this lack of a background because of the way it is written. I hadn't heard of Kofman before then and I assume most of my readers hadn't until they read this, so it comes as a shock to be expected to produce a scholarly dissertation and to be merely repeating what others have said numerous times. It seems odd you gave no examples.<br /><br />As the title suggests, this blog is about 'the space of writing', so what I wrote seems entirely in keeping with that. Perhaps you could start a blog to redress the balance away from my apparently contemptible autodidactism.Stephen Mitchelmorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-66283833367232628242018-01-29T22:04:28.179+00:002018-01-29T22:04:28.179+00:00A great post, but you lean quite heavily on some e...A great post, but you lean quite heavily on some established and enduring tropes common in anglophone scholarship on Kofman and in blog posts on Smothered Words, which tend to fetishize the texts on the Shoah and to neglect the great tension these works sit in with the rest of Kofman's œuvre. This is in part thanks to Dobie and Smock's introductions which seem to dissimulate some of the complexity of the texts in order to secure Kofman's legacy (though I think Dobie does point towards some apparent contradictions in the text in her introduction?).<br /><br />These same blog posts (and this same tradition) is always more or less silent on the texts where Kofman explicitly avows this tension: for example, a chapter of her Explosion II which comes to quote Antelme at length and a 1993 "Post-scriptum" to Smothered Words, the latter of which is available in English ("To the agonal formula which terminates Ecce Homo: 'Dionysus against the Crucified', I sensed that I had substituted this: 'Antelme against Nietzsche', such as if Robert Antelme had been for me the figure of a necessary counter-ideal.")<br /><br />A similar fetishisation (if it isn't too strong a word...) seems to be at work in the easy connection of Kofman's suicide to Smothered Words (and the silence on the many, many texts written in the long period between 1985 and 1994). Obviously Rue Ordener plays its part, but it's always positioned as Kofman's 'last words' and constantly cited and worked upon whereas the final text on Nietzsche and Voltaire, published after Rue Ordener, Rue Labat ("Elle pourtant elle tremble...") is completely passed over, as is her killing herself on the anniversary of Nietzsche's birth... Equally, the very great tension which plays out with Nietzsche after Antelme's death is dropped to the side like it's nothing even whilst its very patently one of the most central aspects of Kofman's late work.<br /><br />There's something very seductive about Smothered Words which seems to lead many readers to admire it a great deal and then to stop short at it - maybe because of the appearance of a quite sure-footed position and of some radical renewing of a humanism which it gives (which is addressed at length in a very manic book on Freud and jokes which is equally passed over in spite of being written at exactly the same as Smothered Words!). But as you note, the whole text (and its voice) is qualified at the outset as a conditional and hypothetical: "if it is true that [...], then I must say [...]". Maybe this seductive aspect sits behind the cottage industry of rehashed anecdotes, blog posts, and statements about Kofman and her relationship to the Shoah? I hope this doesn't seem too aggressive a response to your obviously genuine reaction to and admiration for the text, but it seems a shame that over thirty years after Smothered Words being published there's still no real examination of Kofman's legacy in these articles and posts: we're still getting the same hushed citations of the first page of Rue Ordener, the same pathos, the same leap from Smothered Words to her suicide nine years after its writing, the same celebration of the "mastery" of her writing and its apparent disintegration, etc., etc... and then nothing more.<br />n/ahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14952752662622694843noreply@blogger.com